In my 10 plus years in the web industry, I have had the pleasure (or pain depending on how you look at it) of working for both big companies and startups. There are benefits to working at both, but when it comes to product development, the advantage seems to tip towards one more so than the other. It clearly seems to tip towards the little guys (I mean startups), but why, why do they seem to have the advantage?

I think there are several reasons as to why small startup companies have a distinct advantage over their Big Company counterparts. For starters (no pun intended), they are typically small concentrated teams, anywhere from 2 -30 people. By being a small team, you can stay extremely focused on the task at hand, building a great product. By being this small, it affords you the benefit of being very nimble and quick to react to changes. The company generally is focused on building one product, and the livelihood and future of the company is generally riding on the success of that product. It is amazing at what a little motivation can do for a team (I mean, if you do not launch a good product and it is wildly successful, chances are you will be out of a job and back to eating Ramen noodles again). All this: small, nimble, narrowly focused, sink or swim is what gives the small companies the upper hand when it comes to launching a successful product quickly (this is assuming that the product is received well in the industry, otherwise they crash and burn much more quickly than a big company).

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I know I am a little late on this post (since it is actually day 4 now), but better late than never. I sat in on a few good presentations / panels today, gleaned a few good nuggets here and there. The first one was Social Networking Winners and Losers, and it was given by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Gina Bianchini of Ning, Matt Cohler of Facebook and Mike Speiser of Yahoo. Gina outlined what makes a social network successful as: having great partners, create social norms, make the network personal, reach an area of human life and also to make it such that a user gains instant gratification from using your network. All pretty straightforward, but I think sometimes those that are developing social networks overlook a few of these. One other great point of the presentation was in order to make your network better, every time a user interacts with it, that interaction should be captured and used to make the next experience for the next user even better. If you take that to heart, then you will continue to build out a great product.

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